- Forum >
- Topic: Swedish >
- "Era elefanter äter."
49 Comments
I know you are joking, but just to be clear:
You would use the Swedish sentence here if you were talking to a group of more than one person. Each person might own only one elephant.
"Owned by the subject previously mentioned" - it's a possessive that doesn't quite exist in English. If I were to say "Maria ate her food" then this would be "Maria äter sin mat", as opposed to "Maria äter hennes mat" which would sort-of translate as "Maria ate food that is owned by some woman that isn't Maria".
Sitt for ett-words, sina for plurals.
Following your explanation the use of sin would be translated as " Maria is eating her own food" as opposed to some other food, as I understand it.
Is it a sign that I'm learning too many languages when I spell it "elefant" in English?
I take it as a sign that English is too stubborn to make sense, only spelling it with a 'ph' because of some weird worship of Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece.
Thank you! Using an archaic PH combination when there's a perfectly valid letter F is truly stubborn. I hope the language evolves one day.
It's not stubborn worship. It's simply how the language has naturally evolved over time.
You know it is plural because 'elefanter' is plural; singular would be 'elefant'.
This might be helpful to some people in understanding er, ert, and era as well as din, ditt, and ditta:
112
There's a lot going on here. If there was one elephant it would be din (singular) elefant, or er (plural) elefant. With multiple elephants, it would be dina (singular) elefanter, or era (plural) elefanter. Yes?
Re-recording
The voice is not quite perfect on this sentence, as of May 10th, 2018, so I've taken the liberty of re-recording it.
To be honest, it's not terrible here, but I'm currently doing some re-recordings on sentences that appear early on, where multiple words are stressed incorrectly. And that's the issue here - the sentence should be much more fluid, but there are weird stresses that make the voice break off slightly at several occasions.
Please find a correct recording on http://duolingo.vydea.io/6e4aa74b589344f089ceb4532f6ba5f5.mp3
For more info on re-recordings, please check the info thread: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/23723515
Thanks for listening. Ha en bra dag! :)
-
There are different words for 'you' depending on whether you mean you = one person or you = several people. (du vs. ni)
-
There are different words for 'your', depending on two different things: (a) whether the 'your' refers to just one person or to more than one person; (b) whether the 'your' is describing an en noun, an ett noun, or a plural noun.
So what I've learned is that is it usually always 'Era' over 'Ert' or 'Er' to say 'Your' when discussing plurals. Correct?
It depends on what you mean by 'plural'.
-
On the one hand, there is the 'your' that refers to a singular you (when something belongs to just one person, and the 'your' that refers to more than one person (when something belongs to plural you = 'you all'.)
-
On the other hand, the noun being described by either of the above can be either singular or plural.
For example:
your car (singular you = du) - din bil
your car (plural you = ni) - er bil
your cars (singular you = du) - dina bilar
your cars (plural you = ni) - era bilar
your apple (singular you = du) - ditt äpple
your apple (plural you = ni) - ert äpple
your apples (singular you = du) - dina äpplen
your apples (plural you = ni) - era äpplen
If 'era' seems to be used more frequently than 'er' or 'ert', it is probably because when you are talking about more than one person, you usually also are talking about more than one noun belonging to those people.
Is "era" really pronounced with such a long "e"? I kept thinking the word must be one i forgot that started with y, g, j, or i
The word 'elepfanter' is plural, so you need the plural form 'era'. The form 'ert' is singular neuter.
I've been reading a lot of other discussions, but I still don't understand Er-Era-Ert, Din-Dina-Ditt, Sin-Sina-sitt
I know that the ones ending 'a' are plural, but I still don't get the others.
I'm going to be extra explicit for the sake of clarity. The first one is for "your", as in one person.
- din = you (one person) have something which is a singular en-word
- ditt = you (one person) has something which is a singular ett-word
- dina = you (one person) has multiple of somethings
The second one is for "your", as in multiple people.
- er = you (multiple people) have something which is a singular en-word
- ert = you (multiple people) have something which is a singular ett-word
- era = you (multiple people) have multiple of somethings
Then we have sin/sitt/sina, which works a little differently. Let's say you have an English sentence like "he looks at his sheep" - you can guess that "his" means the sheep that belongs to the "he", but they could belong to some other male.
In Swedish, we have different words for "his" depending on whether it's his own of something, or somebody else's. So sin/sitt/sina means "his/her/its" for something that belongs to the same person, and it's for en-words / ett-words / plurals, respectively.
I hope that helps!
i would say : ¨dina elefanter äter¨..the same case as saying ¨det är dina nycklar¨. isn´t right?
dina is if it's one person, era if there are multiple people.
The voice sounds correct to me. What do you find incorrect, please?
If I heard someone say this phrase I would have no idea what they said. "Era elefanter .... almost sounds like one word instead of two. Say it out loud and see if you don't agree.
